Hey everyone, thanks for tuning in to episode number 266 of our Civil War podcast.

I'm Rich.

And I'm Tracy.

Hello y'all.

Welcome to the podcast.

As y'all recall with the last episode, Stonewall Jackson's famous flank attack at the Battle

of Chancellorsville got underway on the evening of Saturday, May 2, 1863, and shattered the

11th Corps of the Army of the Potomac.

By the end of the last show, we'd seen that in just an hour and a half, Jackson's surprise

attack had rolled forward and overwhelmed the Federal's 11th Corps, driven it a mile and

a quarter, and routed it from its last feasible defensive position at Dowdall's tavern.

Jackson's flank attack had so far been a resounding success.

In Dowdall's tavern, it was less than two miles to the Chancellor house and the heart

of Hooker's position.

But…

But, now the sun had set, which meant that perhaps just 40 minutes of evening twilight remained.

And so just then, as Rebel Artilorist Porter-Exile Alexander put it, daylight was worth a million

dollars a minute to the fortunes of the Confederacy.

In his book Chancellorsville, 1863, The Souls of the Brave, Ernest Ferguson writes,

The thickness of the forest, some trick of the breeze, kept the sound of the fighting

from the ears of Joe Hooker at Chancellorsville.

On the pillared veranda of the house, he and his aides, captains William Candler and Harry

...